About the yips

Golf Things Considered column by John Rogers
JSpencerRogers@msn.com 

Probably the most dreaded shot in golf is the shank. And the shank, which is when we hit the ball with the neck of the club rather than the clubface, unfortunately travels in herds.

I’ll see a golfer at the driving range hit one or two of the ugly things, the ball squirting off at right angles to the target or rolling disgracefully 20 yards out, and next thing you know, that’s the only shot he can hit. The strange thing is that the person in the next stall will start firing off those disgusting hosel-rockets, too. Soon enough, half of the people at the range will inexplicably start peeling off shots in every direction, and they’ll look around to see if anyone was watching, or they’ll glance accusingly at their clubhead as if their equipment suddenly malfunctioned. Read more

She got game

Story by Chris Graham

Followers of women’s basketball know the significance of the numbers IX and 10.

“IX” refers to Title IX, the landmark federal law that in 1972 mandated that schools, colleges and universities provide equal funding to men’s and women’s sports.

“10,” of course, relates to the 10th season of the Women’s National Basketball Association, which was founded in the aftermath of the run of the U.S. Women’s National Team to the gold medal in the 1996 Atlanta Games.

You might be surprised to learn what the number “1892″ means to the history of women’s basketball.

Give up? That’s the year that the first women’s game was played – three months after James Naismith put up the first peach basket.

“Most people who follow women’s basketball can go back to the days of Nancy Lieberman and Ann Meyers – but anything before Title IX is beyond them,” said John Molina, a Connecticut man who is leading an effort to launch a museum dedicated to the history of women’s hoops.

The 80 years that preceded Title IX were a roller-coaster ride – with the game alternately flourishing and waning depending on the mores of the times.

“The early women’s game was very sedate by today’s standards – but at that point in time, in the Victorian Era, to have women doing something at all physical out on a court with a ball was quite revolutionary,” said Susan Shackelford, the co-author of Shattering the Glass: The Dazzling History of Women’s Basketball from the Turn of the Century to the Present.

The roots were put down in women’s colleges in the Northeast in the 1890s – and in short order the sport, different from its male counterpart in that women played six players to a side, with three players on each side of halfcourt, became so popular that school administrators became worried that “the women were not showing the proper decorum, that they were sweating too much, that they were too aggressive, they were too jazzed up about competition,” Shackelford said.

“Even though the notion of what a woman could do physically had broadened, and basketball was a good example of that, the social notion of what a woman should act like didn’t really encompass competitive sports. So to be a proper lady of the time, you couldn’t be but so competitive – you couldn’t be but so active,” Shackelford told The Augusta Free Press.

Women’s basketball didn’t die off, though – the game by the early years of the 20th century had also caught on in working-class communities in the Northeast, the South and into the Midwest where women played a different role in the prevailing social order.

“There was a much broader notion of what women could and couldn’t do in these working-class and black communities,” Shackelford said.

“If black women, for example, were going to be out in the fields pulling cotton all day, which they were apt to do, in the South, anyway, to go run up and down a basketball court was nothing. And in working-class communities, blue-collar communities, the women and the girls worked – hard, physical labor – either in mills or in industrial settings or even just in the community in some regard, just to get by. So again, playing basketball was no great shake,” Shackelford said.

Molina’s grandmother, Bernice Molina, was one of the thousands of women who played organized basketball in the first golden age of women’s hoops in the 1930s. At the game’s highest level was a professional touring team known as The All-American Redheads – who routinely took out the all-male teams who served as their nightly competition.

“They played over 200 games a season. They traveled around from town to town – playing against men and playing by men’s rules. And they were really popular – they used to get thousands of people at their games,” Molina told the AFP.

The Redheads survived well into the Title IX era – after weathering the storm in the 1950s and 1960s that saw the social gains of women in the Depression and World War II years reversed to a great degree.

“The game saw a downturn in participation after World War II. The nation went very conservative – and people didn’t by and large see sports as a great opportunity for women,” Shackelford said.

“They thought that women ought to be at home, raising children, doing things close to home and hearth. There was very much a narrowing of the perceptions of the roles of women in society after the war – and basketball was one of those things that was hurt by this,” Shackelford said.

The passage and implementation of Title IX in the 1970s didn’t change those attitudes overnight, by any means. Barbara Kelly, the first women’s basketball coach and director of women’s sports at the University of Virginia, remembers being informed that she had $27,000 to cover operating expenses for her entire athletics program.

“We had to find facilities, we had to find equipment, I had to arrange the schedules, we had to find officials, had to find uniforms, we had to plan transportation,” Kelly said in an interview for Mad About U: Four Decades of Basketball at University Hall, by Chris Graham and Patrick Hite, which is set for release in October.

And Kelly also had to make sure that her team’s games didn’t run too long. More than once, Kelly told the authors of Mad About U, someone representing the men’s team would approach her on the sidelines in the middle of a game and ask her to get the players off the floor so the men’s team could begin warming up for a practice or a game.

Within a few years of the passage of Title IX, though, it seemed that a sea change had occurred. Colleges and universities began offering scholarships to women’s basketball players in the late 1970s – around the same time that an Ohio-based entrepreneur, Bill Byrne, put into motion a plan that led to the development of the first women’s professional sports league, the Women’s Pro Basketball League.

“He figured that with Title IX fully implemented that that meant there was going to be an explosion in girls’ and women’s sports – and he figured that one place that would manifest itself was in team sports like basketball. So he specifically had Title IX in mind when he founded the league,” said Karra Porter, the author of Mad Seasons: A History of the first Women’s Professional Basketball League, a chronicle of the WBL years.

The league played for three seasons – from 1978 to 1981 – before a lack of national media exposure led to its ultimate doom.

“They had to overcome a lot of assumptions about women’s basketball. I mean, believe it or not, some people, even including news reporters, still thought they were playing the halfcourt game. You have to remember, the halfcourt game really only went by the wayside in 1972 – and in some places it was a lot later than that. They had to overcome all of these perceptions about women’s basketball and women athletes,” Porter told the AFP.

The pioneers of the early years of college basketball and the WBL are cognizant of the fact that today, 34 years into the Title IX era, a decade into the run of the WBL’s successor, the WNBA, that battle is far from being over.

“There are still miles to go,” said Rosemarie Skaine, the author of Women College Basketball Coaches, which examines the history of women’s basketball from the 1890s forward.

“Those who were in the game before and after Title IX see it as having come light-years ahead of where it was before. When you look back in the beginning, they had to keep men out of the games, and they had to wear these ridiculous uniforms. Things were better, but there were still restrictions,” Skaine told the AFP.

“In my own experience as a player growing up in Nebraska, we played intramurally – we didn’t play teams from other schools. And then it was only a couple weeks of the year – or whatever they would allow in their curriculum for basketball. There wasn’t much opportunity, really, to participate. You had a couple of weeks of basketball, and then you had to go into flag step clubs and cheer the guys. There was a girls’ athletics association – but basically you ended up redecorating the health room or something like that. It’s a different world now,” Skaine said.

“There may be miles that we still have to go – but we’ve come a long way, I think, by allowing people to develop,” Skaine said.

Football, Canadian style

Story by Chris Graham

Jack Bedell is, by day, a poet and college professor in Louisiana.

On nights and weekends, though, Bedell is a football fanatic – and his football of choice is Canadian.

“Everything that we like in the modern era about the NFL, and then with the rise in popularity of the Arena League and Arena2, those are the things that the Canadian league has been based on – the wide-open passing game, the multiple-receiver sets, the use of running backs as much more diverse players than just someone to be just a three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust-type player. I think all of that stuff is the 100 percent backbone of the CFL – and makes for an exciting audience game,” said Bedell, an English professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and regular contributor to CFLInsider.com.

“The pace of the game is great. With a 20-second time clock instead of a 40-second clock, with only one timeout per half – the pace of the game is incredible. All of the things that we kind of complain about as American NFL fans are taken care of in the rules system and have been for 30 years in the CFL,” Bedell told The Augusta Free Press.

The Canadian Football League is indeed alluring to fans in the United States – and to U.S.-based college and professional players, who have long viewed the close cousin of American football as an outlet for jumpstarting or extending their football careers.

Because of the differences in the two games – the CFL field is 10 yards longer and 12 yards wider than the field used in the National Football League, and CFL games are played with 12 players on the field for each team, one more than the number of players per team on the field in the NFL – players overlooked by the NFL as being supposedly undersized are valued in Canada, where the emphasis is not as much on size as it is on speed and quickness.

“The players whose skillsets are not necessarily what are prestenciled-in to the NFL scouts’ clipboards definitely benefit from the more wide-open game,” Bedell said.

“You’ve got rush ends who are 6-1, 225, 230 – your Dwight Freeney types – who are playing on every team up there. It’s the rare occasion when a Dwight Freeney gets drafted high in the NFL. Most of the time, players that size with that skillset are overlooked and have to really fight and claw to get on an NFL roster as unsigned free agents. In Canada, it’s the lifeblood of defense – with the size of the field and defensive schemes that are played by every team,” Bedell said.

Offensive players who are considered undersized also benefit from the more wide-open game played in the CFL. Wide receiver Kerry Watkins was written off as too small (5-10, 183 pounds) coming out of Georgia Tech – but he has flourished in Canada, catching 97 passes for 1,364 yards for Montreal in 2005 to emerge as a breakout star in his second season up north.

“The way the game is played up here, we’re throwing it pretty much 90 percent of the time. It’s a receivers’ league, and that’s what we love about it,” Watkins told the “ACC Nation” radio show in an interview last month.

“It’s extremely fun. You enjoy it. It’s almost like a track meet. You’re running constantly, so you pay the price. But it all pays off,” Watkins said.

Former North Carolina quarterback Darian Durant – a 5-11, 214-pounder who spent part of the 2005 season on the practice roster of the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens – differs with Watkins in his assessment of the CFL as a “receiver’s league.”

“It’s a quarterback’s league,” Durant told “ACC Nation” earlier this month.

“The main thing is just getting adjusted to having an extra guy on the field,” Durant said of the key difference in the style of play. “They play with 12 guys up here – and most of the time it’s an extra defensive back. So that’s the main thing. The field is a little wider, so of course you have to be careful with some of the throws that you make.

“It kind of takes me back to my high-school days – when I played with four or five wide receivers every down. It’s definitely something that a quarterback would love to do,” Durant said.

Fans in the States have long had the opportunity to follow former college stars like Durant and Watkins in the CFL – CFL games were broadcast for years on ESPN and ESPN2 before moving to America One and several regional sports channels in the current decade.

The league famously tried to capitalize on the Stateside fan interest by expanding into the U.S. in the 1990s – though to say that the move didn’t exactly work out would be an understatement.

“I wasn’t surprised that it didn’t work,” said Steve O’Brien, the author of The Canadian Football League: The Phoenix of Professional Sports Leagues, which traces Canadian football back to its origins in the 19th century.

“They’ve always tried to have a U.S. presence – but that’s not why they did this expansion,” O’Brien told the AFP. “The CFL was essentially bankrupt in ’92 – so they were trying to find new revenues. And they didn’t have the luxury of time, and they didn’t have the luxury of properly checking out owners. Basically, they didn’t do their homework.”

O’Brien and Bedell agree that the expansion could have been a success had it not been for the fact that the league tried to place teams in markets that didn’t seem to be a logical fit.

“It could’ve worked in some markets – but going into the Deep South like they did with Shreveport, Memphis and Birmingham, and then in ’95, Las Vegas, that was a disaster waiting to happen,” O’Brien said.

“I thought it was a curious move to come down to the South. It was a curious choice not to try Michigan or Maine or Portland – places where at least people could put their rabbit ears up and catch Canadian games. It looks like that would have been the cities that they picked – but they chose to come down South in markets that are college markets to us. I think that had as much to do with the failure of those franchises as anything – that they came down to a place where Alabama and Auburn rules, or Shreveport, which is just not a city capable of maintaining a professional team,” Bedell said.

There is talk yet again, O’Brien said, of adding perhaps two U.S.-based teams to the league – to augment the noticeably skinny lineup of eight franchises that are competing for the Grey Cup in 2006.

“If you listen to the league propaganda, the league has never been healthier – the sponsorship revenues are up, the TV ratings are at an all-time high, they’re drawing younger fans to the stands and to the TV. Everything on that front looks good,” O’Brien said.

“It’s been a steady buildup almost from the last decade – from the time they got the loan from the NFL. They were on death’s door by the time of the ’96 Grey Cup – and then little by little, they clawed their way back,” O’Brien said.

“Canadian football has been around since the time the country was founded – back in the 1860s,” O’Brien said. “One point that I tried to get across in the book was that no matter what the CFL does to itself, or what anybody tries to do to it, it has this uncanny knack for survival – and it’s proven that more than once.”

That, among many things, is what is appealing about Canadian football to the American poet-professor Bedell.

“I think it can only grow in terms of its fan base in the States – especially with the television exposure that it’s getting right now,” Bedell said.

“More and more fans who have DirecTV or Comcast or Fox can pick these games up – and even though it’s not really well marketed down here, once they see that every roster is full of big-time NCAA talent or players that might have had a cup of coffee in the NFL, I think they would get hooked,” Bedell said.

“If you watch 10 minutes of a CFL game, I think that’s enough to sell any football fan,” Bedell said.

The merits of the new NBA age restriction

Story by Chris Graham

Michael McCann, like the rest of us, assumed that the talk about how NBA players who had entered the league straight out of high school were ruining the professional game was at least somewhat on target.

So when the law professor began to notice that his research into the impact of the influx of teen-agers on the NBA wasn’t going the way he assumed it would, he did a doubletake. Read more